Ground game will put Hillary Clinton in the White House

2of 2Hillary Clinton, 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, waves while arriving during a campaign event in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., on Friday, Nov. 4, 2016. As the U.S. presidential race heads into its final weekend, Donald Trump is showing strength in Iowa and Ohio pre-Election Day voting, while Clinton's advantage in early balloting looks stronger in North Carolina and Nevada. Photographer: Daniel Acker/BloombergPhoto: Daniel Acker, Bloomberg

It’s going to be close, but HRC Inc. — as in the Hillary Rodham Clinton machine — is going to squeak past the 270 electoral college votes needed to win Tuesday and become our next president.

Clinton will win because her fellow Democrats are better organized and more disciplined at getting out the vote than Donald Trump and his supporters.

It’s not going to be a pretty win. Whatever hope Clinton had of rolling into the final week on a wave of positive press vanished with FBI Director James Comey’s cryptic notification that his agents were looking into her email mess again. That ensured she would be playing defense until election day.

But unlike Trump, Clinton and her supporters know that you don’t win the game by running all over the field, making five laterals to try to fool the other team. It’s about basic blocking and tackling: setting up phone banks and having a network of state and county party organizations that will call, text and knock on the door of every potential voter, until people are so sick of the attention that they fill out a ballot.

And now, with the growing popularity of mail ballots and early voting, it’s about doing all that well before election day. The Democrats have gotten good at this in the past few presidential elections, and by all indications they’re doing well this year, too.

Clinton isn’t the only Democrat who could benefit from the operation. The fear of a Trump win has bumped up turnout in a number of states, which could bode well for the party in U.S. Senate contests in states such as Wisconsin, Indiana and Illinois — maybe enough of them to return the upper chamber to Democratic control.

As for Trump, he’ll come out of the election with a full head of steam toward what he probably wanted all along: a refreshed reality TV career, this one in right-wing politics.

Interesting item the other day on the political website the Hill, that San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee is on the short list of names being tossed around to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development or the Education Department in a Hillary Clinton Cabinet.

HUD in particular would be a perfect fit. Lee has always been a great administrator, and having been mayor, he knows firsthand what cities need from the federal government in the way of housing help.

Even the hint of a rumor of Lee’s early departure from City Hall sets off a whole new round of speculation: Who would replace him?

Maybe termed-out state Sen. Mark Leno, who has looked into a run for mayor in the past. City Attorney Dennis Herrera hasn’t made any secret of his ambitions, and Supervisors Aaron Peskin, Mark Farrell and London Breed could well try to persuade their colleagues on the board to appoint them to fill out Lee’s term.

Gov. Jerry Brown put in a terrific appearance the other day at the annual Willie Brown Institute breakfast at the Grand Ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel.

He spoke for about 25 minutes to a crowd that included Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, state Controller Betty Yee, state Board of Equalization Chairwoman Fiona Ma, Assemblymen Phil Ting and David Chiu, and Mayor Ed Lee.

Being respectful of the institute’s nonprofit status, Brown steered clear of obvious electioneering. He did say his dog, Sutter, had peed on the mailers from the campaign favoring state Proposition 53, which would pretty much kill high-speed rail and Brown’s delta water tunnel plan. And in the end, he couldn’t help telling everyone that he was voting for Hillary Clinton.

After all, when you get that many politicos together, they’re going to talk politics. Take state Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones and Peninsula superlawyer Joe Cotchett, potential state attorney general candidates who found themselves seated next to each other.

If you’re downtown Tuesday, stop by John’s Grill on Ellis Street for the traditional election day lunch. Owner John Konstin picks up the tab from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.

You meet new people. Last year I met Tom Steyer, the ultimate pitch man for good causes. I’ll be there to greet you, and to serve you, if necessary.

The other day this guy comes up and says to me, “Mayor Brown, think about it. If Donald Trump wins, we’ll have a billionaire white man moving into public housing that was just vacated by a black family.”

Two-term mayor of San Francisco, renowned speaker of the California Assembly, and widely regarded as the most influential African American politician of the late twentieth century, Willie L. Brown, Jr. has been at the center of California politics, government and civic life for four decades. His career spans the American presidency from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush, and he’s worked with every California governor from Pat Brown to Arnold Schwarzenegger. From civil rights to education reform, tax policy, economic development, health care, international trade, domestic partnerships and affirmative action, he’s left his imprimatur on every aspect of politics and public policy in the Golden State. As mayor of California’s most cosmopolitan city, he refurbished and rebuilt the nation’s busiest transit system, pioneered the use of bond measures to build affordable housing, created a model juvenile justice system, and paved the way for a second campus of UCSF to serve as the anchor of a new development that will position the city as a center for the burgeoning field of biotechnology.

Today, he heads the Willie L. Brown Jr. Institute on Politics and Public Service, where he shares his knowledge and skills with a new generation of California leaders.